When Are We Going to Play?
It wa
s late October and several of my students were asking me: “when are we going to play that video game?” It was a good prod to get rolling and finalize the Gone Home unit . I coordinated with Dr Jennifer Jenson, the lead researcher whose team would be documenting the experience, and we agreed to launch close to the end of November and run it until the start of Christmas break in mid-December, 2013. I hoped it would be a good way to end a long and busy term and keep my seniors engaged as their morale flagged in the dark days winter.
The school where I teach has a 1:1 laptop program, which would allow students to play the game individually, but I had to figure out how to get the game on those laptops. I decided to contact the creators of Gone Home directly to let them know what I was doing and to see if they’d cut me some kind of educational deal for the 60 copies I intended to buy.
First Contact
When I wrote the Portland-based Fullbright Company I didn’t know what to expect, but I was very pleasantly surprised. Rather than dealing with a sales rep, I corresponded directly with the creative team, who were incredibly supportive of the project. Their replies were prompt, and they showed a willingness to help in every way. We should keep in mind that companies like Fullbright are small and may not always be prepared to deal with an avalanche of requests. I was one of the first and perhaps only educators to contact them at a period when they had the time and availability.
The Fullbright Team
My sense throughout our communication was that they were genuinely enthused that their game would be used meaningfully as an educational tool, rather than wringing their hands at the potential sales boost. Despite his demanding schedule, Steve Gaynor, Fullbright’s co-founder and writer and designer of Gone Home, took the lead and responded to every one of my letters promptly and offered a fair education scheme for copies of the games. I quickly came to understand that this very good game came from very good people.
An Indie by Any other Name
Although it has enjoyed mainstream success, Gone Home is what is known as an independent or indie game. What does this mean? For one, indie game developers tend to run small operations with limited budgets compared to the hundreds of millions poured into their triple-A counterparts. Indies are created by individuals or small teams and are more restricted technologically. The problem with large-scale commercial games is that they have to regain all those bags of development money they disbursed and then some, and they aren’t about to take any chances. That’s why they tend to stick to proven formulas, which often include an emphasis on state-of-the-art graphics and a steady rhythm of explosions and headshots. Moreover, creative decisions are hampered by top-down dictums from non-gaming execs. Indie games, on the other hand, are the creative hotbed of the medium – they can afford to take chances, and often do. They are driven by creative vision over market considerations, as beautifully exemplified in the recent documentary Indie Game: The Movie.
It’s worth noting that some independent game makers feel that the “indie” title is inaccurate and counterproductive to the industry. They want to discourage the perception that the financial and technological limitations associated with independent games translate into a presumption about their quality. Nothing could be further from the truth. Recently, Lucas Pope, creator of the hugely successful (dare I say Indie) “dystopian document thriller” Papers Please stated that there are “no indie game-makers and it’s just a case of individuals and studios making small games and large games”. Maybe the term “niche” or some other distinction might be better suited, but overwhelming current usage will likely cause the term “indie” to persist, which broadly justifies my use of it.
The peeps at The Fullbright Company, a self-proclaimed independent studio, have experience in both worlds. Its creative team, led by Steve Gaynor, cut their teeth in big studios, so they import mainstream savvy to their indie enterprise. Since the game’s launch in August 2013, they’ve enjoyed the kind of sales, success and attention usually reserved for their big-ticket commercial brethren, which returns us to the shaky distinction between AAA and indie.
Kickstarter, Steam and The Rise of the Indie
Two key factors that have fueled the growth of the independent game industry are crowd sourcing and digital distribution.
Crowd sourcing has allowed independent game makers to cut corporate ties and truly venture out on their own. Sites like Kickstarter allow developers to gather funds from their fans, without sacrificing creative control of their projects. Tim Schafer’s Broken Age, for example, drummed up a whopping $3.3 million from his wildly successful Kickstarter campaign. Organizations like Indie Fund and Dracogen also provide non-traditional financing options for indie developers.
These days, video games are more likely to be purchased online than at tar and mortar shops which has been a boon for indies. Developers no longer have to deal with prohibitive publication and marketing costs, as online digital distribution platforms like Steam and Humble Bundle do an outstanding job of promoting and selling independent games. Also, companies behind Xbox One, Wii, PS4 now furnish self-publishing kits to encourage independent developers to make games for their popular consoles.
Indies in the Classroom
Why is this good news for education? Because the indie world is much more likely to produce games suitable for educational settings and purposes. By virtue of their deviation from the prescribed recipes for market success, they are often more artistic, empathetic and less likely to include gratuitous sex and violence. Also, an indie’s scaled down graphic requirements are an easier fit with often outdated school computers.
Almost every case of mainstream commercial games being used in classrooms undergo some type of modification to fit the curricular goal. But the uses of indies like Minecraft and, in this case, Gone Home, tend to be unadulterated, which speaks to their innate educational viability. Independent games like Device 6, The Stanley Parable and Papers Please could all easily find a place in the classroom. The first two would be excellent to explore aspects of narrative, and Papers Please would be a great fit for any unit focusing on dystopia, the Cold War or totalitarianism.
A scene from Papers Please: A Dystopian Document Thriller
It’s also worth remembering that in high school English land, few, if any, of the texts we teach were written specifically for educational purposes. Shakespeare and Salinger didn’t write for high school classes, they wrote free standing works of literature that were eventually adopted for educational purposes. Similarly, I believe that many of the games that will find their way into literature and communication classes will not necessarily be designed with a classroom in mind. They will be works of art first and foremost whose innate value as such will make them suitable to study.
Gone Home exemplifies this concept. Rather than deliberately creating a form of edutainment, as I don’t think they had education in mind, the Fullbright team aimed to produce the best game they could in accordance with their artistic principles and social values. What emerged was a rich, nuanced and thought-provoking experience that has a much greater claim on education than most of their commercially driven counterparts.
I’d love to hear about any other indie game you’d recommend for use in the classroom!
NEXT POST: Launch Codes, Info Bulbs and Inventories: Prepping to Teach Gone Home
An Indie Education: Gone Home and Why Independent Games Belong in Classrooms is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
